Virtual Memory Timebased Art and the Dream of Digitality
by Regina Longo
from Film Quarterly Fall 2015, Volume 69, Number 1
Homay King'due south volume, her 2d, is the kind that warrants more than one reading. But there is no awkward or dense prose, often a hallmark of theoretical texts that turn reading into an academic exercise. No, Virtual Retentivity: Time-Based Media Art and the Dream of Digitality welcomes more than ane reading considering it is so pleasurable: insightful, playful, and full of lucid ideas that are the writer's own. In fact, play is a word that appears frequently in this book.
King is not just synthesizing the words of the theorists—such as Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Georg Simmel, Vivian Sobchack, and Due north. Katherine Hayles—with whose piece of work she deeply engages throughout the volume. She is, in effect, inviting the reader to play along. Her shut readings of the time-based art of Christian Marclay, Agnès Varda, Victor Burgin, and Ming Wong encourage creative and generative points of connection between theories and critiques of fourth dimension and potentiality embodied in cinema, the cinematograph, and the cinematic apparatus in forms that bridge the analog, digital, and virtual.
From the offset, King notes that Bergson and Deleuze volition weave their style through the entire text, simply she emphasizes that Bergson's The Creative Heed—a text often overlooked by English speakers in favor of his Matter and Memory—is disquisitional to her conceptions. King delights in the departure that her definition of the virtual tin can bring, that is, a creative, generative exercise that still promises something new. As words, "digital" and "virtual" are ubiquitous. Every bit concepts, the senses of being (actual/digital) and condign (virtual/analog) allow King to examine the work of artists who also desire to experience what the digital has promised, but has not (nonetheless) delivered.
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But what has the digital promised? Male monarch does not arroyo this question obliquely. The start affiliate of Virtual Memory focuses on the piece of work of Alan Turing: a household name past now cheers to Steve Jobs, The Turing Projection (Justine F. Chen and American Lyric Theater, 2012), The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014), and queer scholarship. Rex begins by queering the (A)pple, and so to speak. Or, expanding the origin myth away from the literal and the obvious toward the generative and the possible. In this opening chapter, she discusses the long-standing rumor that the Apple Calculator logo pays tribute to Turing. Steve Jobs and Rob Janoff, who designed the logo, consistently refute these rumors and insist that the apple is a reference to Newton, not Turing. And withal, this myth has get office of Turing and Apple tree Estimator lore. Male monarch presents factual evidence to her readers that allows them to first with what they think they (might) understand about the rise of the digital, then twists and turns it, encouraging them to take a dissimilar approach. King demonstrates how Turing created games to tease his own listen and the minds of others, in order to push the limits of early computational theories and calculating machines.
Situating her case studies of time-based media fine art within the realm of scientific and computational invention is a productive and clever approach. Yet, in the final analysis, the concrete spaces of these films, videos, artists, and artworks are not what seem to have compelled Rex to study them. And why should they be? These artists are all pushing the conventional limits of class and fourth dimension, certainly beyond the narrative conventions of mainstream movie theatre. Male monarch writes eloquently of a reconstructive mode that allows the artists to move betwixt the grade and the act—the "manipulable/digital of the hand/center, and the (reconstructed) pixel" (90). Just every bit King sees the artists' work as a form of reconstruction, so is her theoretical intervention a grade of reconstruction, also.
Regina Longo: Throughout Virtual Memory you move between histories, theories, and practices, tracing a genealogy for the evolution of digital technologies beyond the purely technological. How does this relate to your formal and conceptual analyses of the visual works you discuss in this book?
Homay Rex: In 2009 I taught a seminar called "Transitional Objects: Betwixt Old and New Media." The championship came from D.W. Winnicott's Playing and Reality. I was trying to call back of a way to talk near digital videos and new media artworks as halfway between imaginary and real, and halfway between something belonging to the self and belonging to the other, or the external world. I actually taught the seminar twice—in one case as an undergraduate seminar at Bryn Mawr, and once as a grad seminar at U. of Penn. Nosotros spent a lot of time with the work of Natalie Bookchin, who creates video installations that are fabricated upward of constitute footage from YouTube diaries and testimonial start-person films. They construct incredible narratives, for example about getting laid off from a chore or being on medications. A socioeconomic pattern emerges when hundreds of unlike videos and voices are edited together saying the same things in the same way.
The Winnicottian framework was dropped eventually in favor of Henri Bergson and his concept of the virtual. I don't think exactly when it shifted or what prompted it, only information technology might have been related to the artworks, which always come up get-go for me. The method follows from the material, non the other way effectually. Originally I had wanted to write about works that fall more squarely in the category of new media fine art or web fine art, and even video games. That changed over time.
Longo: Some of the themes you note in Bookchin's work return in Chapter half dozen where you examine the Occupy Wall Street motion. Upon inbound the virtual world of Homay Male monarch, this was not a place I expected to go. This is part of what makes your volume so much fun to read: you lot play with expectations, with the technical, the conceptual, and with words. I recall this is precisely what a theorist should exercise. How would you ascertain your concept of play?
King: In my "Transitional Objects" seminar besides as in other courses, I sometimes teach Roger Caillois's Man, Play and Games. He begins with Huizinga's notion of the magic circle—a time and identify that is marked as separate from everyday life and in which a unlike set of rules use. Play takes identify in the magic circle. It could be a literal infinite, like a sports field. It could exist a figurative infinite, equally with children playing make-believe. Caillois includes mimicry amongst his taxonomy of play-forms, so film and the performing arts are part of his study. Ultimately Caillois finds that what we call the social is in a sense a kind of vast magic circumvolve. Politics involves agonistic competition, take a chance, and function-playing.
And so that's my definition of play. But I think you are also alluding to something in my writing style, the occasional word play, humor, references to riddles and logic puzzles. I made one of the epigraphs a cryptogram, for example. I guess I share that affinity for discussion play with Alan Turing. Humor is social and culturally specific, so someone who enjoys puns and double meanings doesn't, for me, fit the stereotype of the antisocial genius, which is how Turing had been in my view incorrectly portrayed (in The False Game, for instance).
I likewise want to write books that people will relish reading, that volition retain all their conceptual sophistication without sacrificing either clarity or pleasure. Word play and humor are part of that. I like to read books that are a pleasure to read. For example, Lacan employs crazy world play and puns and Deleuze has a really wild prose mode. But my favorite works from these authors are those where they are reading literary objects or media objects, for example Lacan on Hamlet, or Deleuze on Francis Bacon [Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, 2002] where he really digs into the distinctions between the digital and the analog. When another text is in play, it grounds things and information technology tin be and then illuminating.
Longo: You use words such as tease and riff to demonstrate the creative power of gestures and acts in fourth dimension-based media art. Can you share a bit more nigh how visual artists such as Victor Burgin piece of work with the conceptual motif of the refrain and how this explicates your theories of the dream of the digital?
King: The idea of the musical refrain is very important to the affiliate on Victor Burgin's work. There, I was trying to theorize a notion of repetition that is neither Nietzsche's eternal return, Benjamin'due south mechanical reproducibility, nor Freud's repetition compulsion. The Deleuzian idea of the refrain is one way out of the recursiveness of those forms, the way they are ultimately stuck in time similar a merry-go-round or broken record. Some other way out is provided by Bergson, who, in a marvelous essay about the phenomenon of déja-vu, describes the experience of re-seeing a play ane has already seen, where a fringe of virtuality surrounds the new experience and marks it equally separate from the prior viewing. And finally, Burgin's gallery videos, which are structured as loops, also provide an antidote to full repetition without divergence, because their meanings are so densely layered that y'all can't maybe view them the same mode twice.
Longo: You engage and re-energize Bergson'due south ideas that art, rather than science, gives us a sense of this move of difference while showing the reader that technology is also a creative space of becoming. All of the visual works y'all examine are in conversation with—and inspired past—more conventional forms of picture palace. How did you cull these objects of study?
Male monarch: Each one came to me in a different style. Varda was start: I published an essay most The Gleaners and I (2000) in 2007, which was in turn based on a conference talk from 2005. So I approximate that means I have been thinking almost these questions for x years. Marclay's The Clock (2010) was hugely important; information technology perfectly crystallizes this dialectic between the analog and the digital and helped me to ascertain what I meant past those terms. The chapter on Occupy Wall Street was originally a one-off slice inspired by that movement in fall 2011. I later came to realize that it was in fact continued to the book and belonged there. Similarly, the affiliate on Victor Burgin came from elsewhere, equally an invited piece for an exhibition catalog. But as I began to explore his piece of work—the newer pieces made with three-D modeling software, his video loops, and his writings—it became clear that they were germane to the book project.
Longo: In Affiliate five, "The Powers of the Virtual," you make a statement about movie theatre as a form of virtual reality, using Deleuze'due south discussion of Orson Welles's F for Fake (1973) to demonstrate that "[i]t is no longer a question of lying or telling the truth just of making images and stories that ask to be understood and taken seriously on their own terms, within the worlds with which they surround themselves" (140).
King: I do think the way Elmyr de Hory disappears into Picasso's oeuvre when he paints a forgery is unlike from, say, anonymous trolls on the internet, or a Catfish (Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, 2010) scenario where someone adopts a simulated persona every bit part of a con game. Being anonymous does non necessarily mean disconnecting from the world or denying accountability. Certainly if Elmyr were to sell a painting under simulated pretenses, there's nix particularly inspired or creative in pulling off a stunt like that. But I think that in F for Fake, Welles is interested in much more the stunt. He's interested in the mode that fictional reimagining can open up stagnant accounts of history or fine art history, that it can knock some life into forms that have grown too tired, rejuvenate worn-out narratives.
Longo: Yous merits that "contemporary artists and practitioners who use digital media have frequently rejected the dream of digitality, in many cases actively subverting it" (9). But you contend that this does non diminish the advancements of digital technology, nor does it negate their usefulness for artists and others. Meanwhile, information technology doesn't free the artists, their artworks, or those who experience these artworks from "earthly, time-leap concerns."
King: The digital dream—the Cartesian or silicon dream described in the book'south introduction—aspires to occupy a time and identify that is fully separate from this world. In that location could be celluloid films that do this; once again it's not medium-specific. But the dream is "digital" in spirit. It involves an aspiration to be free of gravity, complimentary of the past, complimentary of thing. Information technology isn't a salutary way to imagine change. It'southward nearly the will to ability, or wanting to play god, to destroy the globe and start over again from zero. Cinema's indexical tie to the physical earth and to durational fourth dimension, whether nosotros accept it as scientifically grounded or not, keeps motion-picture show and analog media connected to our world rather than floating away from information technology. The digital, by dissimilarity, wants to cut this tie.
Longo: Yous state that this Cartesian silicon dream of a virtual world that would free everyone from physical, sensory, and space-leap reality is a myth. However you bear witness how movie theater itself is a grade of virtual earth in which one tin can get immersed—a identify where an creative person like Ming Wong can play with these Deleuzian concepts in his brilliant engagements with classical Hollywood movie theater and the European New Moving ridge in Persona Performa (2011) can insert himself into other artists' worlds and aggrandize their oeuvres in the process. Should theorists distinguish then betwixt the dream of the digital and the dream of cinema? Practice artists and audiences desire to?
King: They are two split up dreams. The virtual worlds that movie theatre creates are very shut to the actual world. And I should clarify that 1 of the volume'south chief arguments is that fifty-fifty movie theater made on digital equipment can be analog in spirit and vice versa: the argument is not medium-specific. "Cinema" in this more conceptual sense can help the audience to imagine change, to imagine that things might be otherwise. It can enact changes upon images and memories of things that we previously idea we understood completely.
This is why I prefer the concept of the virtual to the fake or false: it's less about pulling off a trick and proverb "gotcha!" than well-nigh proverb "what if?" and thereby imagining how things could be otherwise.
This gets back to the idea of cinema every bit a course of virtual reality, which I think it definitely tin can be, in this fuller, more than complex sense of the virtual that I effort to elaborate in the book. It'south not a substitute or replacement for reality: that would be false reality, similar the Matrix or a holodeck. That's the dream of digitality: that you are affair-free, that you can fly through space, that nothing ever decays or dies. The meaning I want to requite to the virtual is more subtle, much more Bergsonian. It's a slightly detoured version of reality that doesn't negate what already exists, just that suggests other ways information technology might have gone or might go in the future.
Longo: You lot are coming out of a prolific catamenia. Your kickoff book, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Knuckles Academy Press, 2010), has just served as the inspiration for a landmark show that opened in May 2015 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, China Through the Looking Glass, for which you also wrote the catalogue essay, "Movie theatre'due south Virtual Chinas."1 With the prove at the Met through August 2015 and possibly traveling after that, and Virtual Memory hitting the shelves in October 2015, have you been able to find a moment to call back about what you will explore next?
King: My catalogue essay "Cinema'due south Virtual Chinas" is a fusion of the ii books. There is a principle implicit in Lost in Translation and Virtual Memory. For example, the China seen in Von Sternberg [Shanghai Limited, 1932] or Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) is not just a false or inauthentic Prc. They are virtual Chinas that are floating in their own kind of netherworld. A lot was written for that catalog essay that was not used in it. What will my next venue exist? Destination unclear, journey underway.
Note
1. www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/china-through-the-looking-glass.
Homay King
Virtual Retention: Fourth dimension-Based Art and the Dream of Digitality
Duke University Printing, 2015
$23.95 newspaper, $84.95 cloth, 216 pages
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Source: https://filmquarterly.org/2015/09/25/the-digital-the-virtual-and-the-possible-riffing-with-homay-king-on-virtual-memory/